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For the second time in two weeks, some component of the office has broken, and I had to spend time on tech support. Last Tuesday, when we returned from Tofino, it was the DSL. So, I putzed and putzed and putzed wth it, eventually called Verizon, spend 16 minutes on hold (not too bad) and spoke to a great tech named Sarah who was in Northern Michigan. All told it took about 2 hours of my time and then 35 minutes with the techie.
Then yesterday, the printer went kaput. I think that this one is actually my fault, as I was printing some extremely heavy-weight card stock (like thicker than even what the manual says that the printer can handle). Anyway, after 3 hours of my troubleshooting the damn thing, going through their very extensive online resources, I called Dell, and without even a 1 minute wait, was speaking to Crystal in Ontario. After 20 minutes, we determined that it was indeed a broken part, and she lined up a tech support dude to come over today (‘guaranteed next day service’) to replace the back assembly for free.
Why do I mention this? Well, mostly because even though I was exasperated with the fact that the hardware wasn’t cooperating, I was mildly surprised at how painless tech support was. Neither time did it feel like they were just reading scripts. Both times they believed me when I said “I already tried that, it didn’t work; I got this error”, instead of talking me through something that I had tried 20 times.
And neither time was I talking to Bangalore. With all the talk of outsourcing tech support to India these days (and I thought companies like Verizon and Dell would have been the first to line up for that!), I was talking to someone outside of Marquette, MI and Sudbury, Ontario. Yeah, yeah, one is in Canada, so you could say that is outsourced, but not really. And yes, they could have been lying to me, but I always try to quiz people on where they are from. Sarah from Marquette said that she attended Lake Superior State University in Sault Sainte Marie, MI. I know something about that school from my days as a UMaine hockey fan, and she answered a few questions like she had actually attended. With Crystal from Sudbury, I joked about the collapse of the Canadian government last week. Again, seemed to know what I was talking about. Not that someone in Bangalore can’t do research on this sort of stuff, but they both sounded genuine.
So, Mr. Lou Dobbs apparently some companies haven’t exported America, as you claim. |
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12/07/2005 08:52 AM |
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